Saturday, 1 March 2014

An invitation to a family friend's wedding gives Haruka a chance to take a friend along with her - no surprises for guessing who that might be...

Unfortunately, the vagaries of mobile phone reception means that Yuu mishears this invite to a friend's wedding as an offer for Haruka and Yuu themselves to get married, and flustered though she is by the prospect she has no qualms about accepting this offer. This misunderstanding persists through choosing what to wear for the occasion (as surely school uniforms simply won't do?), before Yuu's irritation that she isn't getting to wear a white dress finally reveals the truth of the matter, in turn meaning that Yuu can enjoy the actual wedding without presuming it to be her own.

On the flip side of this, Haruka and Yuu seem unusually distant in the second half of this week's episode, as Mitsuki finds herself receiving an invite to a Christmas event from Haruka, only to find that Yuu is included in said invite too. She quickly realises that something is amiss between the two of them, assuming that they've had some kind of fight and racking her brains for ways to push them back together (quite literally in one case) during the evening out. Of course, the truth isn't quite as cut and dried as that - the pair haven't had a fight, but the weight of the season's expectations seem to be making things rather awkward for both of them.

The whole "comedy from misunderstandings" thing is as old as the hills in anime (and beyond, for that matter), but there was still something enjoyable and genuinely funny about the first half of this week's Sakura Trick before it eventually ran out of steam - an example of the concept executed upon well, you could say. After that, the second half of the episode fell a little flat but somewhat redeemed itself with a sweet ending that has become another hallmark of the series. As a whole then, this was another pretty decent instalment, although it does beg one unanswered question: Why the hell does Yuu have a Microsoft Kinect?!